Can a church be a church without a preaching pastor? It is a complicated question isn’t it? More complicated than it seems. A knee jerk response in either the affirmative or negative misses the complexity of the question. The relationship between pastors, elders and preachers must be considered. Actually, the need for elders comes into question as well. As does the role of preaching in the church.

In church planting groups, there is a growing discussion of whether the need for a preaching pastor isn’t slowing the movement down. ¹For example, see Neil Cole, Organic Church, San Francisco: Jossy-Bass, 2005, 159 and Drew Goodmason’s blog entry amongst other sources. I would say that it most certainly is and that is not the question or the issue. So far, I have not heard the question asked of whether a church should be planted without a preaching pastor. What I’m getting at is not whether the church is or is not a church without one, but what the best for a church is. Some of the younger church planters are saying that they can simply download sermons from SermonCloud or somewhere else on the internet and play them on any given church meeting. ²You guessed it, there is also a move away from traditional Sunday morning worship to other days and times in the week. With advances in technology, we can all benefit from the best preachers and teachers without having to have our own. The money used to pay for a pastor can be spent on other endeavors. Everyone wins!!

Well, back to the complexity question for a moment. Is it biblical to have a church without a pastor? I think it is. Consider Paul’s direction to Titus in Titus 1:5, “I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.” So there were churches in Crete without elders and Paul sent Titus there to appoint some. Here were churches that had been planted without the benefit of having a pastor there at the beginning. On the short term missionary trips I have been on, we have seen churches started because God grated repentance and faith to a group of people but hadn’t raised up a pastor for them yet.

But that isn’t the end of the story is it? Paul sent Timothy to Ephesus and Titus to Crete for a purpose. They were to go there and “put what remained into order” or to finish the work. The work wasn’t done just having the church planted. There was more that needed to be done, there were elders to appoint. It isn’t that they weren’t churches till they had elders, but they weren’t finished till they had elders. I don’t think Paul was happy with the condition of the churches he had planted until there were elders there. In the missionary contexts I mentioned, the church could come together and meet and perhaps have a missionary visit them and help them, but that certainly isn’t the state any of us wanted to leave them in. Part of the missionary’s work was to find them elders and a pastor. The churches wanted that, they were looking for someone to teach them how to be Christians from the Bible. The church grew where God granted it growth and we shouldn’t try to stop that, but let us not be content with it either. We want to see “everyone mature in Christ” (Col 1:28).

So then what’s wrong with just using a prerecorded sermon to fill that bill? Paul didn’t have that kind of technology available to him but if he had, might he not have used it? In a pinch, perhaps. His letter to the Colossians was kind of like that. He wrote a beautiful letter to a church he’d never met (Col 2:1). Perhaps it filled in what was needed at that church. If he could have podcast a sermon to them he might have. But the question still needs to be asked: was it best? I don’t believe it is for a few reasons.

First, there is a immanent danger that our Western, or at the least American, church are becoming entertainment venues. Our culture prizes entertainment quite highly. Consider the wages we pay to top movie stars and sports figures. Entertainment saturates every part of our lives. Our churches must struggle to keep the entertainment mind set out of them. We do not gather together as God’s chosen people in order to be entertained. Do that at home, the church can’t compete with the television or movie theater. We gather to worship God. When church musicians even unintentionally consider what they’re doing to be a performance, we’re in trouble. Beyond that, I really believe that the medium communicates. There is a difference between a live performance at a theater and watching the same thing on television. The medium of a live theater performance brings with it certain expectations. You can’t change the channel when part of the performance gets boring. You can’t go to the fridge and get some snacks. You can’t yell at the performers. You have to be considerate of those around you. These things tend to focus your mind in a way watching television doesn’t. The boring parts are necessary to the story. With a television, you simply flick and then check back later. Or fast forward past it. Or thumb through a People magazine till it sounds good again. The medium of television says that what is happening is all about you. A live performance, while not excluding you, reminds you that something bigger than you is happening here. Movie theaters are a half way point between the two. The medium communicates.

What does a prerecorded sermon played on a boom box or from an iPod with speakers say about the sermon? The medium is communicating whether we think it is or not.

Second, and more important I believe, preaching is a verbal event. It is not a talking head reading a script, it is the sacred interaction between a preacher, the Bible, God’s people and the Holy Spirit. It is more than a communication of information in an entertaining or engaging manner. The preacher knows the congregation and knows how things will or won’t be received. He knows that a person is struggling with an issue that will come up in the sermon and should be handled in a specific way to help them. He knows that his congregation is dealing with issues and so he approaches the text ³I’m not saying that he’ll spin the text in one direction or that he is distorting its meaning to suit his needs. I’m saying that he may emphasize one aspect more than another, not import things into his text. “The word of God is living and active” and engages us in different ways at different times. a bit differently than John Piper (as an example since he is a popular preacher) does with Bethlehem Baptist who are facing different issues. On top of that, the Holy Spirit might lead a preacher to spend more or less time on an aspect of the text or to cover a topic the preacher wasn’t expecting because He knows the people’s hearts better than the preacher or the people do. Putting a tape in a play or hitting a button on an iPod excludes most of that. Sure, the Holy Spirit can use it but not in the same way as a live preacher. That is why God ordained the preaching of his word rather than just the reading of it.

So is it necessary to have a preaching pastor at a church plant? No. If God saves a group of people we cannot stop them from gathering and praying and reading God’s word together. It might even be better for them to hear a recorded message rather than none at all. But we shouldn’t consider the job done either.

Personally, I greatly admire the method Sovereign Grace Ministries uses in church planting. A pastor recognizes the gifts and calling of a man in his congregation to the office of pastor. He takes him under his wing and begins to fan that gift. At some point, the young man is sent to SGM’s Pastor’s College for training. The sending church pays for it and for him to go. After his has been trained, he returns to his church and is sent out as a planter. The gifts and calling are confirmed first and then the man is trained. Does this slow church planting down? Sure but I think it also helps plant more healthy churches.